XINRAN XUE, a Chinese writer, describes visiting a peasant family in the Yimeng area of Shandong province. The wife was giving birth. “We had scarcely sat down in the kitchen”, she writes (see article), “when we heard a moan of pain from the bedroom next door…The cries from the inner room grew louder—and abruptly stopped. There was a low sob, and then a man’s gruff voice said accusingly: ‘Useless thing!’

“Suddenly, I thought I heard a slight movement in the slops pail behind me,” Miss Xinran remembers. “To my absolute horror, I saw a tiny foot poking out of the pail. The midwife must have dropped that tiny baby alive into the slops pail! I nearly threw myself at it, but the two policemen [who had accompanied me] held my shoulders in a firm grip. ‘Don’t move, you can’t save it, it’s too late.’

“‘But that’s...murder...and you’re the police!’ The little foot was still now. The policemen held on to me for a few more minutes. ‘Doing a baby girl is not a big thing around here,’ [an] older woman said comfortingly. ‘That’s a living child,’ I said in a shaking voice, pointing at the slops pail. ‘It’s not a child,’ she corrected me. ‘It’s a girl baby, and we can’t keep it. Around these parts, you can’t get by without a son. Girl babies don’t count.’”

In January 2010 the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) showed what can happen to a country when girl babies don’t count. Within ten years, the academy said, one in five young men would be unable to find a bride because of the dearth of young women—a figure unprecedented in a country at peace.

The number is based on the sexual discrepancy among people aged 19 and below. According to CASS, China in 2020 will have 30m-40m more men of this age than young women. For comparison, there are 23m boys below the age of 20 in Germany, France and Britain combined and around 40m American boys and young men. So within ten years, China faces the prospect of having the equivalent of the whole young male population of America, or almost twice that of Europe’s three largest countries, with little prospect of marriage, untethered to a home of their own and without the stake in society that marriage and children provide.

Gendercide—to borrow the title of a 1985 book by Mary Anne Warren—is often seen as an unintended consequence of China’s one-child policy, or as a product of poverty or ignorance. But that cannot be the whole story. The surplus of bachelors—called in China guanggun, or “bare branches”— seems to have accelerated between 1990 and 2005, in ways not obviously linked to the one-child policy, which was introduced in 1979. And, as is becoming clear, the war against baby girls is not confined to China.

Parts of India have sex ratios as skewed as anything in its northern neighbour. Other East Asian countries—South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan—have peculiarly high numbers of male births. So, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, have former communist countries in the Caucasus and the western Balkans. Even subsets of America’s population are following suit, though not the population as a whole.

The real cause, argues Nick Eberstadt, a demographer at the American Enterprise Institute, a think-tank in Washington, DC, is not any country’s particular policy but “the fateful collision between overweening son preference, the use of rapidly spreading prenatal sex-determination technology and declining fertility.” These are global trends. And the selective destruction of baby girls is global, too.

KENTUCKYREDBONE

03-15-2010, 12:13 PM

Very scary thought! It takes both Male and female to reproduce!

NateR

03-15-2010, 01:06 PM

So within ten years, China faces the prospect of having the equivalent of the whole young male population of America, or almost twice that of Europe’s three largest countries, with little prospect of marriage, untethered to a home of their own and without the stake in society that marriage and children provide.

Sounds like the ideal formula for the largest and most deadly army to ever walk the face of the earth.

Bonnie

03-15-2010, 01:45 PM

Sounds like the ideal formula for the largest and most deadly army to ever walk the face of the earth.

I was also wondering if that is their goal. What are they going to do as their diminished female population gets older and is no longer producing babies....oh, excuse me....male babies? :rolleyes: Whatever their plan, they are being very short-sighted to the consequences.

Maybe all they'll end up with is the largest male gay population the world has ever seen who just want to make love not war. :wink:

Neezar

03-15-2010, 02:03 PM

I was also wondering if that is their goal. What are they going to do as their diminished female population gets older and is no longer producing babies....oh, excuse me....male babies? :rolleyes: Whatever their plan, they are being very short-sighted to the consequences.

Maybe all they'll end up with is the largest male gay population the world has ever seen who just want to make love not war. :wink:

Reading that just after Nate's comment painted a horrible (but funny) picture in my mind. :laugh:

Sounds like the ideal formula for the largest and most deadly army to ever walk the face of the earth.

Yes, it still may be the most deadly. :laugh:

MattHughesRocks

03-15-2010, 02:59 PM

Are you saying that girls can't be deadly? :rolleyes:

Sounds like the ideal formula for the largest and most deadly army to ever walk the face of the earth.